Weather Looks Pristine for NASA Climate Satellite Launch Friday

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NASA is gearing up for the planned Friday (Oct. 28) launch of its
newest Earth-observing satellite, a trailblazing spacecraft that
will be the first to make observations for both short-term
weather forecasts and long-term climate monitoring.

Appropriately enough, it looks like Mother Nature will cooperate.
Current forecasts call for a zero percent chance of
launch-violating bad weather.

The National polar-orbiting operational environmental satellite
system Preparatory Project — or
NPP for short — is due to blast off from Vandenberg Air Force
Base in California at 5:48 a.m. EDT (0948 GMT) Friday, aboard a
Delta 2 rocket.

Preparations for an on-schedule launch are coming along nicely,
with the NPP team completing its launch readiness review today
(Oct. 26), NASA officials said. So everything should go off as
planned.

"It's looking to be very favorable conditions for launch day,"
Lisa Cochran, launch weather officer at the 30th Operations
Support Squadron at Vandenberg, told reporters during a briefing
today.

Monitoring weather and climate

Once aloft, the minivan-size NPP will zip around Earth in a polar
orbit, peering down at our planet from an altitude of 512 miles
(824 kilometers).

The $1.5 billion satellite will use its suite of five science
instruments to make a variety of observations, which should be
useful to weather forecasters and climate modelers alike,
officials said.

For example, NPP will record sea and land surface temperatures,
track atmospheric ozone and dust levels, measure changes in
vegetation productivity and monitor
sea ice, land ice and glaciers around the world, among other
things, researchers said.

"It's the prototype of the next-generation weather satellite,"
NPP project scientist Jim Gleason, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a recent NASA video. "It's the
nation's first attempt to really combine weather monitoring and
climate observing in the same platform."

A testbed for future satellites

NPP was originally conceived as a demonstration mission for the
National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite
System (NPOESS), a joint military-civilian project that would
monitor both weather and climate.

However, NPOESS was scuttled in 2010, doomed by a series of
delays and rising cost estimates. The military-civilian
partnership was dissolved, with each branch directed to develop
its own line of polar-orbiting Earth-observing satellites.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) are working on the civilian program, which is called the
Joint Polar Satellite System, or JPSS.

While NPP will gather important data itself, the satellite is
also viewed as a key step toward bringing JPSS online. For
example, NPP will try out technology that could be incorporated
into JPSS, researchers said.

NPP is designed to be operational for at least five years, which
should keep the satellite working until JPSS is ready to go. The
first JPSS satellite is slated for launch in late 2016, officials
said.

NPP is not the only payload aboard the Delta 2. The rocket will
also carry six cubesats —
tiny satellites that measure about 4 inches (10 centimeters)
across — into orbit. The cubesats were designed by university
students and will ride to space as part of NASA's Educational
Launch of Nanosatellites program.

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on
Twitter:@michaeldwall.
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